As workers at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels set up for OneLife LA – an annual pro-life rally that had been moved from downtown Los Angeles due to wildfire smoke — volunteers wheeled in the 300-pound brass tabernacle that firefighters had recovered a week earlier from the ashes of Corpus Christi Church in Pacific Palisades.
No announcement had been made that the undamaged tabernacle with the Blessed Sacrament inside would be at OneLife LA, but those present recognized it from a story that has gone around the world via Catholic media. As soon as it entered the sanctuary, people dropped to their knees to venerate what has become a profound sign of God’s presence amid devastating loss.
On Feb. 18, the Archdiocese of LA’s Digital Team released a short documentary looking at the damage inside the destroyed church with Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Brian Nassour, who rescued the tabernacle. He was accompanied by Captain Frank V. Lima, who is both general secretary and treasurer of the International Association of Fire Fighters, and a former Pacific Palisades firefighter who had often worshiped at Corpus Christi.
Nassour again recounted how his crew had returned at dawn from a long night of fighting fires. It had been four days since a Jan. 7 fire had destroyed Corpus Christi, leaving a twisted steel frame that stood precariously in a 40-mph wind. But that morning Nassour made an impromptu decision to search the ruins for sacred objects.
As he stood in what had been the church entrance, he saw beyond enormous piles of charred wreckage to the stone high altar and the brass tabernacle atop it.
“It was just glistening,” he said.
Another firefighter helped him lug the tabernacle to a department pickup truck, while a third monitored the damaged steel beams amid the howling wind.
At any sign of collapse, Nassour told the others, “we’re dropping this, we’re running out.”
Inside the fire station, awed firefighters wanted to inspect the tabernacle, but Nassour gave strict orders that, because of its sacred contents, no one was to touch it until someone from the archdiocese came to claim it.
“At that point, with four days of not sleeping, guys were beat down, guys were extremely tired,” Nassour said of his crew. But although he told them to get some rest, “believe it or not, all six guys jumped in there without hesitation” to search for more sacred objects.
Digging on their hands and knees in the debris, they found just a few. Sometimes they saw a liturgical book but “every time we picked one up and thought we had it, it fell through our hands because it was just ash,” Nassour said.
The twisted steel girders indicated that the temperature inside Corpus Christi had been at least 1,000 degrees. Its brick walls had created an oven, capturing the heat. Cement had exploded, the roof melted. All but a few panes of the clear glass front wall had shattered. But the 14 stained-glass windows depicting the stations of the cross were virtually unscathed.
Neither Nassour nor Lima understand why.
“The fact that those didn’t break from the heat or from a beam falling ... we thought it truly a miracle. How can that happen?” said Lima, who visited the ruined church and briefly prayed there with Ed Kelly, the Boston-based general president of the International Association of Firefighters. “That glass should have been breaking out like the whole front of the church is broken out.”
For the firefighters, the joy of the recovered tabernacle has been an antidote to the unspeakable sadness and stress of their labors as thousands of homes burned.
“What they did that day, it brought hope to a big community, even outside the Catholic community,” Lima said.
After seeing that the tabernacle and the few other salvageable items were returned to Msgr. Liam Kidney, pastor of Corpus Christi, the Palisades firefighters made it their mission to search other sacred sites.
“Every guy was like, ‘Hey we need to find other places of worship around here to make sure that we return everything back to where it should be — the synagogue, the Presbyterian church, the Methodist church that burned down,” Nassour said.
With the devil’s brew of flames, hurricane force winds, blinding smoke, and fallen electrical lines, Lima called it a miracle that no firefighters died, and that other deaths have been relatively few. He attributes that to both prayer and well-trained firefighters.
Under the conditions, “the loss of life should have been in the thousands,” Lima said. “It’s a couple of dozen, which is horrible. But 28 compared to, say, 2,800 was due to the phenomenal work of our members.”
After his role in saving the tabernacle became public, Nassour was inundated with expressions of thanks and prayers for his safety, for which he is grateful. It took a couple of weeks to understand the ramifications of the rescue of the tabernacle, that the Church views it not as saving a treasured object, but as protecting Christ himself.
The gratitude “has been wonderful, but at the same time, I didn’t do it for this. I did it for everybody,” he said. “We chose this profession because we want to help.”
He prays daily with his wife and children, giving thanks for all that they have.
“My dad always told me, ‘Just think that you’re never alone,’ ” he said. “If your back is against the wall right now, there’s always someone there who is bigger than us that’s going to be pushing us and motivating us to be able to get through these tough times.”
